Thus far talk of a Green New Deal (a resolution rather than a bill for now) has been essentially a matter of broad aspirations and statements of principle. Still, it has got me thinking about what such a program might actually look like in its concrete details, particularly its scale, the speed with which it might go about its work, and the source of the needed funds.
In considering these matters it is common for people to refer to World War II. They tend not to know very much about the conflict, but they have a sense that it was a period of extraordinary efforts and extraordinary results--and as it happens, the numbers bear out this impression. As the official Wartime Production Achievements report shows, in a mere four years (1940-1944, between the Fall of France and D-Day), the U.S. built the equivalent of sixty percent of its pre-war manufacturing capacity, new, modern plant geared toward the most high-tech production, along with commensurate increases in the associated infrastructure needed to make it work. (Even electricity generation, given a low priority by wartime planners, expanded 26 percent in the relevant time frame.)
Of course, a Green New Deal is not about a headlong enlargement of output for its own sake. But all the same, there is no question but that a greening of the economy will require a massive, rapid production of modern infrastructure, vehicles, plant, with which to replace what exists now, and the World War II example does demonstrate that the U.S. successfully accomplished this in the past. Indeed, there are at least three excellent reasons to think that a Green New Deal conducted in the present could actually do much, much more at any given level effort than the wartime effort accomplished in the 1940s.
#1. The remaking of the U.S. economy was not the goal of the World War II effort. This was all secondary to supplying the biggest war effort in history, as the U.S. successfully did during the more than five years in which it was embroiled in the conflict. Had the U.S. economy's modernization been the object, much more of the resources mobilized would have been directed toward that end, with greater effect, as may be expected today.
#2. The World War II effort took place not only for the sake of a war effort, but in wartime, "siege" conditions. As the U.S. went about its role as the "arsenal of democracy," virtually all of Europe was under Nazi domination, the other great industrial center that was northeast Asia also firmly in the Axis camp, and, especially in the earlier phases of the conflict, Nazi U-boats stalked the seas. American and global resources could have been utilized much more fully in conditions where normal, peacetime trade was possible, for the sake of any conceivable end, and it is reasonable to expect that this, too, will be the case. (Still more helpful, and far from implausible, would be an American Green New Deal alongside, or coordinated with, other nations' efforts--or even a global Green New Deal--potentially achieving great synergies.)
#3. Manufacturing productivity--our ability to make physical things--has exploded. There do not seem to be many data sets which offer a comprehensive view of manufacturing growth between the 1940s and today, but it seems safe to say that per-hour output in this area has risen sixfold overall since that time. Impressive in itself, it is worth noting that this considerably outstripped the growth of the economy overall (per capita GDP rising more like three-and-a-half times since 1945), which at least hints that a given amount of time and proportion of resources would go further toward rebuilding the base (especially as it would be more a matter of replacement than of any and all possible addition in the interest of maximized wartime production). Moreover, given the realities of capacity utilization, product differentiation, and other factors business finds commercially expedient, but which obstruct efficient output, it may be that the means to hand actually confer still more productive capacity than the more mainstream statistics acknowledge, for any desired purpose.
We should also consider the host of extraordinary technological possibilities recently emerging but far from properly exploited as yet, and whose development a Green New Deal could sharply accelerate--for instance, in the area of materials that could replace an energy and greenhouse gas-intensive steel and iron industry, and the synergies they make plausible with regard to rebuilding the manufacturing base along greener lines. (What could we begin to do if we started mass-manufacturing carbon nanotubes out of captured atmospheric carbon, and then used these to build radically strong but light structures and vehicles and machinery--for instance, more efficient new wind turbines?)
Indeed, I will come out and say it--when it was possible to build the equivalent of a quarter of existing electricity generation in four years, when this was a low priority, under wartime conditions, with 1940s-era resources, when this is made a very high priority, with open access to the global market, and the fullest possible use of twenty-first century resources, it seems possible that such an effort thoroughly rebuild the electric grid, and transport, industry, agriculture too, between now and, say, 2030.
Of course, having established this people will ask "How will we pay for it?" I will say up front that this sniveling response says more about those asking the question than anything else. This is, after all, a matter of SAVING CIVILIZATION, AND MAYBE LIFE AND DEATH FOR THE ENTIRE PLANET, and the question indicates that they do not understand this--and are trying to dismiss the plan. (After all, how many of those who whine "How will we pay for it?" where environmental initiatives are concerned ask those questions when the matter is war and peace? When it is tax cuts and other goodies for the rich?)
Making them look even more foolish is the reality that paying for the project is not the impossible obstacle that opponents of a given idea always make it seem. One could easily imagine some redirection of government resources--not least, the diversion of the colossal resources devoted to subsidizing fossil fuels (depending on the mode of calculation, at the very least many tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps as much as $1 trillion a year) toward moving past them, shifting a field long, massively tilted in favor of established energy resources in favor of renewables, yet again quickening their progress. Of course, only a portion of the funds the action would raise would be conveniently at government's disposal (oil subsidies substantially consist of tax breaks and the tolerance of externalities), but the point is that it would at least create room for maneuver.
Taxes on corporations and the rich generally are also at historic lows--and one could picture significant additional funds raised by bringing back the tax levels that, we actually had back during the war, possibly helped by a crackdown on offshore tax havens. (Indeed, even without such, France's government has succeeded in taking over half its Gross Domestic Product annually in government revenue for decades, in contrast with under a third in the U.S. at all levels, a figure that if proportioned to the U.S. economy would come to $3-5 trillion a year.)
Admittedly each and every one of those possibilities makes right-wingers seethe, but their hating them is not the same as saying they would be unworkable, while the scale of the resources in questions means that even a partial capture of resources through such action could be significant. One might easily imagine a trillion dollars or more a year being raised on top of Federal infrastructure spending and other relevant orders that might be made in line with such a program, and the Federal government's capacity to induce state and local governments and private business to shift their spending along those lines it finds desirable, one would have an unprecedented, "game-changing" program in this area (orders of magnitude greater than the highly touted investments of the early Obama years).
One might also seek a measure of supporting action from the monetary system, the flexibility of which seems to be much greater than is widely appreciated. The 2008 bailout is open to very serious criticism on a great many scores. Still, reading accounts of it I cannot deny the ingenuity and dash with which portions of it were carried out--the manner in which the U.S. Federal Reserve raised and deployed nearly THIRTY TRILLION DOLLARS in support for the financial system (roughly 200 percent of U.S. GDP at the time). While the situations are not identical, there is no reason why, should it be necessary, the central bankers could not do a great deal for other purposes, with few worthier than a Green New Deal.
All the same, this would likely fall short of a true World War II level effort, which amounted to about twice the country's pre-war GDP spent in the 1941-1946 period--about $40 trillion in today's terms. And while a Green New Deal could achieve much more of its goals at any given level of investment than the World War II-era effort because of its different purposes, circumstances, and the greatly increased productivity and technological possibilities of the present, it is not inconceivable that the resources scraped up in the way discussed above might not seem enough to buy all that is desired, as desired, as quickly as desired, given the scale and severity of the environmental challenge. Deficit spending--the same deficit spending at which Green New Deal opponents do not balk for the sake of war, upper-class tax cuts, corporate welfare--is an option, the more so as spending of such a kind, on such a scale, can be expected to translate to a boom which, if World War II is anything to go by, substantially paid for itself over the longer run.
Counterintuitive as this may sound, the figures are undisputed. The U.S. economy grew by 75 percent during the war years, and the productivity increases that war effort achieved contributed to a generation of boom afterward (4 percent a year growth 1950-1973). As a result, in spite of colossal Cold War expenditures that included two major "hot" wars (Korea and Vietnam), and massively enlarged domestic spending (these were the years of the Great Society), America's debt-to-GDP ratio was actually much lower in the early 1970s than it was before the war (32 percent versus the earlier 52 percent of GDP figure). Of course, that is not to deny the fact that the U.S. was heavily indebted at war's end (with the debt-to-GDP ratio about 120 percent), but history has demonstrated that countries can, if necessary, bear a far higher debt burden than the U.S. is doing for long periods. Japan's debt, at 236 percent of GDP, while far from enviable, shows that life can go on quite comfortably under such conditions--far, far more comfortably than if we were to suffer the full brunt of the rapidly unfolding climate-energy-environmental crisis.
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
Thursday, April 4, 2019
Why Do (Some) Democrats So Vehemently Deny Their Party Was Neoliberal?
Telling us that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were not neoliberal seems a denial of the meaning of the word, and the reality of their well-known policy record--to such a degree that anyone espousing this political position can seem like a flat-earther. That being the case, why do people ready to so vehemently promote such a position seem so common now?
The simple answer is that the term "neoliberalism," completely uncontroversial in the past (and still completely uncontroversial among serious students of society, politics and economics now), entered wider, more popular use among a public that had always been to the left of the party, that was becoming more so, and which seemed more assertive of its leftishness. In the process it became a threat, one the party's Establishment could no longer abide. One supposes that they could have opted to apologize for their past, and declare a break with their prior conduct, but they elected to do so. This is not only because "We were wrong" are three of the hardest words in the English or any other language; not only because after their longtime embrace of such ideology and policy they must doubt that they will be believed; but because the party's past is also its present. It has been neoliberal before; and its leaders intend to go on being neoliberal.
When one moves past the oddity and incoherence of the claim to its underlying motives, one gets the impression of an Orwellian attack on the English language, on history, on the memory of the recent past. And perhaps unsurprisingly, while I have run into people making this claim online many, many times, not one of them argued in good faith. In fact, just about every single one of them showed themselves to be a troll.
For that reason I will no longer answer the questions of anyone who takes issue with my characterization of the administrations of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, or the Establishment Democrats more generally, as neoliberal. If they really are interested in what they have to say, I have already got in my two cents and they can look at that. If they are uninterested in what I have to say (I remember referring one particularly stupid and vehement troll to one of the items, and their snapping that they weren't "going to help [my] self-promotion"), then there is no reason for us to talk--and anyway, all the means for educating themselves on this matter, which would in no way contribute to my "self-promotion" (if that prospect is indeed so disturbing to them) are just a few keywords away. In either case, my days of humoring their demands for "debate" are done, and none too soon because I have too, too many other and better things to do with my time.
The simple answer is that the term "neoliberalism," completely uncontroversial in the past (and still completely uncontroversial among serious students of society, politics and economics now), entered wider, more popular use among a public that had always been to the left of the party, that was becoming more so, and which seemed more assertive of its leftishness. In the process it became a threat, one the party's Establishment could no longer abide. One supposes that they could have opted to apologize for their past, and declare a break with their prior conduct, but they elected to do so. This is not only because "We were wrong" are three of the hardest words in the English or any other language; not only because after their longtime embrace of such ideology and policy they must doubt that they will be believed; but because the party's past is also its present. It has been neoliberal before; and its leaders intend to go on being neoliberal.
When one moves past the oddity and incoherence of the claim to its underlying motives, one gets the impression of an Orwellian attack on the English language, on history, on the memory of the recent past. And perhaps unsurprisingly, while I have run into people making this claim online many, many times, not one of them argued in good faith. In fact, just about every single one of them showed themselves to be a troll.
For that reason I will no longer answer the questions of anyone who takes issue with my characterization of the administrations of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, or the Establishment Democrats more generally, as neoliberal. If they really are interested in what they have to say, I have already got in my two cents and they can look at that. If they are uninterested in what I have to say (I remember referring one particularly stupid and vehement troll to one of the items, and their snapping that they weren't "going to help [my] self-promotion"), then there is no reason for us to talk--and anyway, all the means for educating themselves on this matter, which would in no way contribute to my "self-promotion" (if that prospect is indeed so disturbing to them) are just a few keywords away. In either case, my days of humoring their demands for "debate" are done, and none too soon because I have too, too many other and better things to do with my time.
Reviewing Obama's Record
I recently decided to follow up my study of Bill Clinton's record in office as President of the United States with a study of Obama's administration. I approached the matter somewhat differently in his case. Rather than tracking down authoritative listings of major policy actions and systematically working through that, I focused more tightly on what were indisputably the key three areas of policymaking in his administration--Obama's handling of the Great Recession, his energy policy and his health reform.
I was struck by the curious echoes of the Clinton record in Obama's.
Clinton promised economic stimulus, infrastructure spending and health care reform. All of these initiatives fell by the wayside early in the Clinton administration. By contrast Obama realized something of them, but consistently underdelivered, with an undersized, brief, tax cut-reliant stimulus aimed only at avoiding completely "catastrophic failure" rather than getting the country over the crisis; a small portion of the work that the American Society of Civil Engineers has consistently pointed to as needed after decades of neglect; and a health care reform limited to requiring everyone to buy private care (an approach Obama himself earlier compared to eliminating homelessness by requiring everybody to buy a house), with a mix of consumer protections and government subsidies sweetening the deal (but still leaving 30 million uninsured).
Where Clinton proved a deregulator of finance Obama proved a pseudo-regulator, with Dodd-Frank taking the obsequiously business-friendly spirit of Clinton's Reinventing Government initiative to parodic extremes, even after enabling the continuation of the largest financial bailout operation in history.
Clinton, despite much rhetoric about the environment, presided over an extraordinary, heavily government-subsidized expansion of fossil fuel production and consumption as he signed an international agreement regarding the curbing of climate change that, in spite of its mildness, the Senate never ratified, and Obama, while directing a measure of government resources toward renewable energy and energy efficiency, by and large did the same (the U.S. adopting the 2015 Paris agreement by executive order, not Senate ratification).
Yet, if Obama produced more in the way of results than Clinton, the situation also demanded more than it did in Clinton's time. The crash of 2008 was far more severe than the recession of the early 1990s. In 2015 the necessity for action on the climate crisis was far more apparent than in 1997. And the burden of the health care system weighed still more heavily on America's economy and people in 2010 than it did in 1993 (up from 13 to 17 percent of GDP, while thanks to wage stagnation, per capita health expenditures rose from 11 to 17 percent of median household income).1 And needless to say, the goal and means were, on each occasion, consistently, deeply neoliberal.
1. In 1993 it was 13.4 percent of GDP and $3,400 per capita; in 2010, 17.3 percent of GDP and $8,400 per capita. This made for a 29 percent jump in health care's share of GDP, and a still bigger jump in its share of household income. Health spending figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation, household income figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.
I was struck by the curious echoes of the Clinton record in Obama's.
Clinton promised economic stimulus, infrastructure spending and health care reform. All of these initiatives fell by the wayside early in the Clinton administration. By contrast Obama realized something of them, but consistently underdelivered, with an undersized, brief, tax cut-reliant stimulus aimed only at avoiding completely "catastrophic failure" rather than getting the country over the crisis; a small portion of the work that the American Society of Civil Engineers has consistently pointed to as needed after decades of neglect; and a health care reform limited to requiring everyone to buy private care (an approach Obama himself earlier compared to eliminating homelessness by requiring everybody to buy a house), with a mix of consumer protections and government subsidies sweetening the deal (but still leaving 30 million uninsured).
Where Clinton proved a deregulator of finance Obama proved a pseudo-regulator, with Dodd-Frank taking the obsequiously business-friendly spirit of Clinton's Reinventing Government initiative to parodic extremes, even after enabling the continuation of the largest financial bailout operation in history.
Clinton, despite much rhetoric about the environment, presided over an extraordinary, heavily government-subsidized expansion of fossil fuel production and consumption as he signed an international agreement regarding the curbing of climate change that, in spite of its mildness, the Senate never ratified, and Obama, while directing a measure of government resources toward renewable energy and energy efficiency, by and large did the same (the U.S. adopting the 2015 Paris agreement by executive order, not Senate ratification).
Yet, if Obama produced more in the way of results than Clinton, the situation also demanded more than it did in Clinton's time. The crash of 2008 was far more severe than the recession of the early 1990s. In 2015 the necessity for action on the climate crisis was far more apparent than in 1997. And the burden of the health care system weighed still more heavily on America's economy and people in 2010 than it did in 1993 (up from 13 to 17 percent of GDP, while thanks to wage stagnation, per capita health expenditures rose from 11 to 17 percent of median household income).1 And needless to say, the goal and means were, on each occasion, consistently, deeply neoliberal.
1. In 1993 it was 13.4 percent of GDP and $3,400 per capita; in 2010, 17.3 percent of GDP and $8,400 per capita. This made for a 29 percent jump in health care's share of GDP, and a still bigger jump in its share of household income. Health spending figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation, household income figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Saturday, March 23, 2019
Remembering the Kosovo War
The Wars of the Yugoslav Succession (1991-1999) are little remembered today in the United States, and this may seem to go especially for NATO's intervention in the Kosovo War, which began twenty years ago (on March 24, 1999). Part of it would seem to be that they did not fit in with the more general focus on the Middle East, the larger, more intense, more precedent-breaking conflicts in which overshadowed them (the 1991 Gulf War fought just a few years earlier, the near-continuous action against Iraq ever since, the wars that followed from 2001 on); did not involve the boots on the ground that raise the specter of high U.S. casualties and public questioning; did not ever command much enthusiasm among the American public.
Still, in hindsight, the conflicts seem a watershed, in ways extending far beyond the war's hugely important local consequences. The wars in the Balkans, along with the contemporaneous wars in Central Africa (Rwanda, and the two Congo Wars), sounded the death knell for those short-lived, early '90s, post-Cold War visions the mainstream held of multilateral humanitarian interventions setting the world to rights.
Looking back, the conflict between the West and Russia over the action, which entailed the denial to it of United Nations authorization, and a measure of nuclear saber-rattling many would seem to prefer not to remember, and the confrontation between their forces at Pristina airport that came so close to a shooting war (one of the odder legacies of which is the idea some have that singer James Blunt SAVED THE WORLD FROM WORLD WAR III), seem less a last gasp of the Cold War than a foreshadowing of NATO's disregard for Russian opinion bumping up against a renewed Russian assertiveness--of what we have since seen in Georgia (2008), in Ukraine (2014-), in Syria (2015-). Likewise, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by a B-2 bomber during the campaign was also far from the last worrisome incident in Sino-American relations, which have similarly become more adversarial.
It also seems that the manner in which the 1999 war was fought--that style of slow-motion, drawn-out, gradually escalating, all-aerial warfare campaign conducted in support of one side against another in another country's internal conflict without the American public paying much attention to it--has been routinized in the years since. Libya is perhaps the most obvious case, but one can say the same of Syria as well, and Somalia, and Pakistan, and wherever else the drones fly.
This past not even being the past, we overlook it at our peril.
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Still, in hindsight, the conflicts seem a watershed, in ways extending far beyond the war's hugely important local consequences. The wars in the Balkans, along with the contemporaneous wars in Central Africa (Rwanda, and the two Congo Wars), sounded the death knell for those short-lived, early '90s, post-Cold War visions the mainstream held of multilateral humanitarian interventions setting the world to rights.
Looking back, the conflict between the West and Russia over the action, which entailed the denial to it of United Nations authorization, and a measure of nuclear saber-rattling many would seem to prefer not to remember, and the confrontation between their forces at Pristina airport that came so close to a shooting war (one of the odder legacies of which is the idea some have that singer James Blunt SAVED THE WORLD FROM WORLD WAR III), seem less a last gasp of the Cold War than a foreshadowing of NATO's disregard for Russian opinion bumping up against a renewed Russian assertiveness--of what we have since seen in Georgia (2008), in Ukraine (2014-), in Syria (2015-). Likewise, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by a B-2 bomber during the campaign was also far from the last worrisome incident in Sino-American relations, which have similarly become more adversarial.
It also seems that the manner in which the 1999 war was fought--that style of slow-motion, drawn-out, gradually escalating, all-aerial warfare campaign conducted in support of one side against another in another country's internal conflict without the American public paying much attention to it--has been routinized in the years since. Libya is perhaps the most obvious case, but one can say the same of Syria as well, and Somalia, and Pakistan, and wherever else the drones fly.
This past not even being the past, we overlook it at our peril.
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Thursday, February 28, 2019
The Cowardice of Consumer-Bashing; or, Neoliberal Environmentalism
The environmental movement has taken numerous forms, and indeed, just about every conceivable form with regard to ideology, so much so that one must be careful in generalizing about it. But it seems safe to say that mainstream environmentalism, like mainstream everything else today, emerged in the neoliberal era, and accommodated itself to that era. Despite the unavoidable clash between the demands of environmentalism and the prerogatives of capitalism (not least, the impossibility of infinite economic expansion on the basis of a finite resource stock), it has been neurotically fixated on not appearing even mildly critical of the existing socioeconomic system.
Indeed, rather than radical critique, it has preferred to couch its criticism of society's thrust in terms of a vague "we"--as in "We failed to heed the warnings," or "We went on with our wasteful ways"--that blurs together all of humanity, drawing no distinction between the chief executive officers of ExxonMobil and BP and starving children in the Sahel. This explicitly asserts the "sociological nonsense and political irresponsibility" that "we all possess equal powers to make history," making them accessories, often quite knowing accessories, to the irresponsibility of those who actually hold the levers of power.1 Only the most obtuse, ill-informed or shamelessly dishonest can claim that the key political decisions regarding energy and climate, for example, were made by the public, or even represented it--when these institutions went to such great lengths to lie to the public, to confuse and distract it, to combat even the principle of its having a say (what neoliberalism, after all, has been about in the end), and then when that public voted for sane policies, frankly refused to deliver those policies. (In 2008 Americans elected a President who promised an end to fossil fuel subsidies, cap-and-trade, a Green Jobs Corps. Instead they got the "all-of-the-above" energy policy that put into practice his opponent's running mate's cry of "Drill, baby, drill!")
Indeed, where it has been more targeted in its criticisms, environmentalism has emphasized the subjective and individual--looking away from the fact that over seventy percent of greenhouse gas emissions are generated by the operations of just one hundred corporations, thinking about which not only takes us far closer to the root of the problem given those corporations' practical control over what gets made and how, but because of their size, organization and resources generally are better able than anyone else to change all that, and in the small number of organizations involved an excellent focus for thought and action about solutions; in preference for talking up the carbon footprint of seven billion individuals. It is, they make very clear, incumbent on the individual consumer to sacrifice by choosing carefully, paying more--rather than incumbent on the manufacturer to provide the greenest products available at any given price (and the thought of regulation to that end, anathema), ignoring the realities of power, and equity. The consumer has already lost a major option when, the political system having failed them by refusing to provide adequate public transport, they are forced to buy a car and drive many, many miles in it just to have a job. When buying that car they are restricted to buying what they can afford from the models that an oligopolistic car industry is prepared to market--something it has done in line with its preference for selling not just old-fashioned gas-burners, but more vehicle per customer. But it is the consumer that it lambastes.
In it all one can see a retreat of environmentalism into an austere, misanthropic, religiosity which thunders against the consumer, "You have had it too good for too long!" (especially naked where it seems to positively gloat over the idea of civilization's crashing down and a Great Die-Off taking most of humanity with it and taking the rest back to the Dark Ages). The attack on the consumer, too, can appear a sort of compensation for their complete lack of success in relation to the genuinely powerful--or shabbier still, their taking their frustrations out on those in no position to resist. It bespeaks real failure. Hopefully, rather than bespeaking it, environmentalism will admit it, abandon what has not worked, and think of what might--intellectual and moral courage rather than cowardice, in a readiness to admit that realizing its goals may not always allow for complete accommodation of the preferences of every last powerful interest out there, and a preparedness to think big. I, for one, am convinced that at this late stage, nothing less than a 100 percent-renewable-energy-and-large-scale-geoengineering moonshot can save us from catastrophe, and the sooner we see the obvious taken for granted, and properly acted upon, the better.
Indeed, rather than radical critique, it has preferred to couch its criticism of society's thrust in terms of a vague "we"--as in "We failed to heed the warnings," or "We went on with our wasteful ways"--that blurs together all of humanity, drawing no distinction between the chief executive officers of ExxonMobil and BP and starving children in the Sahel. This explicitly asserts the "sociological nonsense and political irresponsibility" that "we all possess equal powers to make history," making them accessories, often quite knowing accessories, to the irresponsibility of those who actually hold the levers of power.1 Only the most obtuse, ill-informed or shamelessly dishonest can claim that the key political decisions regarding energy and climate, for example, were made by the public, or even represented it--when these institutions went to such great lengths to lie to the public, to confuse and distract it, to combat even the principle of its having a say (what neoliberalism, after all, has been about in the end), and then when that public voted for sane policies, frankly refused to deliver those policies. (In 2008 Americans elected a President who promised an end to fossil fuel subsidies, cap-and-trade, a Green Jobs Corps. Instead they got the "all-of-the-above" energy policy that put into practice his opponent's running mate's cry of "Drill, baby, drill!")
Indeed, where it has been more targeted in its criticisms, environmentalism has emphasized the subjective and individual--looking away from the fact that over seventy percent of greenhouse gas emissions are generated by the operations of just one hundred corporations, thinking about which not only takes us far closer to the root of the problem given those corporations' practical control over what gets made and how, but because of their size, organization and resources generally are better able than anyone else to change all that, and in the small number of organizations involved an excellent focus for thought and action about solutions; in preference for talking up the carbon footprint of seven billion individuals. It is, they make very clear, incumbent on the individual consumer to sacrifice by choosing carefully, paying more--rather than incumbent on the manufacturer to provide the greenest products available at any given price (and the thought of regulation to that end, anathema), ignoring the realities of power, and equity. The consumer has already lost a major option when, the political system having failed them by refusing to provide adequate public transport, they are forced to buy a car and drive many, many miles in it just to have a job. When buying that car they are restricted to buying what they can afford from the models that an oligopolistic car industry is prepared to market--something it has done in line with its preference for selling not just old-fashioned gas-burners, but more vehicle per customer. But it is the consumer that it lambastes.
In it all one can see a retreat of environmentalism into an austere, misanthropic, religiosity which thunders against the consumer, "You have had it too good for too long!" (especially naked where it seems to positively gloat over the idea of civilization's crashing down and a Great Die-Off taking most of humanity with it and taking the rest back to the Dark Ages). The attack on the consumer, too, can appear a sort of compensation for their complete lack of success in relation to the genuinely powerful--or shabbier still, their taking their frustrations out on those in no position to resist. It bespeaks real failure. Hopefully, rather than bespeaking it, environmentalism will admit it, abandon what has not worked, and think of what might--intellectual and moral courage rather than cowardice, in a readiness to admit that realizing its goals may not always allow for complete accommodation of the preferences of every last powerful interest out there, and a preparedness to think big. I, for one, am convinced that at this late stage, nothing less than a 100 percent-renewable-energy-and-large-scale-geoengineering moonshot can save us from catastrophe, and the sooner we see the obvious taken for granted, and properly acted upon, the better.
Sunday, December 23, 2018
Three Reviews: David Graeber's Debt, The Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs
I have only recently discovered the work of anthropologist David Graeber--and wish I had done so earlier. Books written for general audiences about social science subjects that read like anything more than a drawn-out magazine article are rare these days, but Graeber certainly delivers the goods in the three titles I have just reviewed, Debt: The First 5,000 Years; The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy; and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (the latter, I was pleasantly surprised to find, issued by publishing giant Simon & Schuster!). Rich in original, bold, conventional wisdom-smashing ideas that turn upside down much of what we (falsely) think we know about our social world (from the moral significance of debt to the efficiency of capitalism), they are not merely of intellectual interest, but relevant to our present day troubles, and like all really worthwhile research, a basis for a great deal of further thought and inquiry. It's a nice bonus that they manage to set forth their ideas as lucidly, as readably, as they do.
Besides the books I also recommand Graeber's essays for Thomas Frank's magazine, The Baffler, freely available here. Of particular relevance to his line of argument in these three works, it seems to me, is "Flying Cars and the Falling Rate of Profit" where Graeber makes it very clear that, contrary to the dismissals of Silicon Valley cheerleaders and the like, that we never got the future symbolized by the flying car does reflect something unhealthy and deeply consequential--a fear of change as destabilizing, combined with a bureaucratization and privatization of scientific research, which the Cold War's end actually encoureaged). I specifically recommend, too, his piece "Despair Fatigue: How Hopelessness Got Boring", which makes the case that, perhaps, the day of the "end of history" conservatives and postmodernist pseudo-leftists is drawing to a close, and a great movement for positive change in the world lies ahead of us.
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Besides the books I also recommand Graeber's essays for Thomas Frank's magazine, The Baffler, freely available here. Of particular relevance to his line of argument in these three works, it seems to me, is "Flying Cars and the Falling Rate of Profit" where Graeber makes it very clear that, contrary to the dismissals of Silicon Valley cheerleaders and the like, that we never got the future symbolized by the flying car does reflect something unhealthy and deeply consequential--a fear of change as destabilizing, combined with a bureaucratization and privatization of scientific research, which the Cold War's end actually encoureaged). I specifically recommend, too, his piece "Despair Fatigue: How Hopelessness Got Boring", which makes the case that, perhaps, the day of the "end of history" conservatives and postmodernist pseudo-leftists is drawing to a close, and a great movement for positive change in the world lies ahead of us.
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Review: The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Joys of Bureaucracy, by David Graeber
David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a densely written, densely documented, conspicuously scholarly (if also highly readable and colorfully written) study, with four hundred pages of densely packed main text followed by sixty, twin-columned pages of even more densely packed footnotes and another forty pages of bibliographical entries after that, befitting its ambitious object--a thorough revision of a very large part of our understanding of the history of human civilization. By contrast, his book The Utopia of Rules, weighing in at less than half the earlier book's length, more sprightly in tone and "think piece" in feel, brings together three previously published essays with new material in what is not a scholarly reconstruction of a big chunk of human economic history and history more generally, but rather a series of meditations tending toward the ideal, the symbolic, the abstract, which merely share certain themes--bureaucracy, and its relations with violence (especially "structural" violence), imagination and rationality.
The introductory piece, "The Iron Law of Liberalism and the Era of Total Bureaucratization," points to the oft-overlooked contribution of the private sector to bureaucratization (it was the U.S. Federal government which was shaped by the corporations, not the other way around); the limitations of the left's critique of bureaucracy (alas, leaving this ground to the growling right-wing populist); and the tendency to underestimate the role of violence, overestimate the role of technology and misrepresent rationality as an end rather than a means in considering the issue of bureaucracy.1 "Dead Zones of the Imagination: An Essay on Structural Stupidity" considers the bureaucracy-violence-"stupidity" nexus, and what he regards as the curious aversion of contemporary social science to the study of bureaucracy; "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit," the failure of "tomorrowland" to arrive as expected, the overhyping of information technology, and the connections of these with the neoliberal project he argues was about preserving the status quo through quashing alternatives, rather than efficiency, technological innovation or growth; and "The Utopia of Rules; or Why We Love Bureaucracy After All," which stresses the human need for regularity and transparency, which bureaucracy promises (even if it rarely delivers them in ideal fashion). Finally the book includes in an appendix "On Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power" which is, actually, about comic book superheroics (particularly Christopher Nolan's 2012 The Dark Knight Returns, which he watched in the wake of the "Occupy" movement with which he had been involved), and their connections with the preceding themes.
By and large, the themes struck me as well worth exploring, and the case he made for his principal ideas for the most part persuasive, and in cases even necessary. (Too often the complex relationship of private to public is simplified into the tidy opposition existing only in libertarian fantasy. Too often the degree of coercion involved in the minutiae of daily life is overlooked. Too many commentators are intimidated by the ridicule that cheerleaders-for-things-as-they-are heap on those who ask why we aren't living more like the Jetsons, and exalt their cell phone as the telos of the universe from the Big Bang forward.) They were also enriched by numerous smaller observations, sufficiently so that the supporting arguments, the offhand observations, the anecdotes (recollections of his field work in Madagascar, for example), provided much of the book's interest--enough so as to make forgivable his tendency to go off on tangents, and his misses as well as hits. (In his frequent resorts to pop culture for explanations, I found him more convincing when writing about Batman than Star Trek, for instance.) That said, much of what he had to say here (regarding the corporatization of finance and financialization of the corporate, the fusion of public and private, the thrust of information technology, etc.) has been further developed in Bullshit Jobs, so that a reader interested in a fuller exposition of his analysis of bureaucracy and its implications would do well to look to that book, but the wealth of material here is more than ample to justify a look from those already familiar with his other works.
1. As Graeber already noted in Debt, just as states called markets into being, they must also sustain them in being, "an army of administrators" required "to keep them going"--and cites Von Mises on this. Where the case of the U.S. specifically is concerned the bureaucratized corporation preceded the expansion of the Federal government, and corporate functionaries played a significant role in building up the New Deal bureaucracy; while the masses of regulation imposed by government are, after all, largely designed by and lobbied for by business.
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The introductory piece, "The Iron Law of Liberalism and the Era of Total Bureaucratization," points to the oft-overlooked contribution of the private sector to bureaucratization (it was the U.S. Federal government which was shaped by the corporations, not the other way around); the limitations of the left's critique of bureaucracy (alas, leaving this ground to the growling right-wing populist); and the tendency to underestimate the role of violence, overestimate the role of technology and misrepresent rationality as an end rather than a means in considering the issue of bureaucracy.1 "Dead Zones of the Imagination: An Essay on Structural Stupidity" considers the bureaucracy-violence-"stupidity" nexus, and what he regards as the curious aversion of contemporary social science to the study of bureaucracy; "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit," the failure of "tomorrowland" to arrive as expected, the overhyping of information technology, and the connections of these with the neoliberal project he argues was about preserving the status quo through quashing alternatives, rather than efficiency, technological innovation or growth; and "The Utopia of Rules; or Why We Love Bureaucracy After All," which stresses the human need for regularity and transparency, which bureaucracy promises (even if it rarely delivers them in ideal fashion). Finally the book includes in an appendix "On Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power" which is, actually, about comic book superheroics (particularly Christopher Nolan's 2012 The Dark Knight Returns, which he watched in the wake of the "Occupy" movement with which he had been involved), and their connections with the preceding themes.
By and large, the themes struck me as well worth exploring, and the case he made for his principal ideas for the most part persuasive, and in cases even necessary. (Too often the complex relationship of private to public is simplified into the tidy opposition existing only in libertarian fantasy. Too often the degree of coercion involved in the minutiae of daily life is overlooked. Too many commentators are intimidated by the ridicule that cheerleaders-for-things-as-they-are heap on those who ask why we aren't living more like the Jetsons, and exalt their cell phone as the telos of the universe from the Big Bang forward.) They were also enriched by numerous smaller observations, sufficiently so that the supporting arguments, the offhand observations, the anecdotes (recollections of his field work in Madagascar, for example), provided much of the book's interest--enough so as to make forgivable his tendency to go off on tangents, and his misses as well as hits. (In his frequent resorts to pop culture for explanations, I found him more convincing when writing about Batman than Star Trek, for instance.) That said, much of what he had to say here (regarding the corporatization of finance and financialization of the corporate, the fusion of public and private, the thrust of information technology, etc.) has been further developed in Bullshit Jobs, so that a reader interested in a fuller exposition of his analysis of bureaucracy and its implications would do well to look to that book, but the wealth of material here is more than ample to justify a look from those already familiar with his other works.
1. As Graeber already noted in Debt, just as states called markets into being, they must also sustain them in being, "an army of administrators" required "to keep them going"--and cites Von Mises on this. Where the case of the U.S. specifically is concerned the bureaucratized corporation preceded the expansion of the Federal government, and corporate functionaries played a significant role in building up the New Deal bureaucracy; while the masses of regulation imposed by government are, after all, largely designed by and lobbied for by business.
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Review: Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber
New York: Melville House, 2012, 534 pp.
David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years does precisely what its title promises, offer a history of its titular subject, and in a broader sense than this reader might expect--not least, because of how much more the word can mean than they might guess, which is in fact Graeber's starting point, as Graeber goes on to show. The first half of the book is a meditation on the idea of debt itself--both how deeply the idea suffuses our moral and religious ideas, our social relationships and language, all around the world; and at the same time, how varied and how (to modern people) strange the thinking about it has been. Indeed, much of it consists of lengthy discussions of comparatively exotic cultural notions about it, and in particular the idea of a "human economy" as manifested in societies ranging from the Irish to the Tiv.
Still, rather than just cataloguing this variety Graeber does advance a number of bold theses. Particularly important among them is that indebtedness, rather than the unfortunate and disreputable position we now think of it as being, may have been regarded as a normal, natural condition, and even a cement holding society together by connecting individuals together, an attitude reflected in the protections traditionally afforded debtors--like the Biblical "Year of Jubilee" which periodically canceled debts. Important, too, is his subversion of the most basic thinking about markets, money, debt. Where conventionally (in Adam Smith, for instance) a "natural" human tendency to exchange for comparative advantage is held to have made markets intuitive, and these are supposed to have led to money, and money to debts, with states generally outside the process, he contends that it was the rise of large, complex institutions--the temple complexes of ancient Mesopotamia identifiable as its state structures--that led to debt. By way of the need for units of account debt led to money, rather than the other way around, while it was states that fostered markets for the sake of mobilizing economies behind military endeavor, and the same rationale led to the transformation of by that point long familiar precious metal-based money into coinage--the standardized little pieces of those metals being handy for paying soldiers on the move.1
The second half of the book, building on many of these ideas, shifts to a systematic history of the development of debt across what might be thought of as the Eurasian "rimlands" over the past three millennia--the Mediterranean region, southern Asia, China, and eventually Western Europe. As noted earlier, Mesopotamia, and southern Asia more generally, were crucial scenes of the development of thinking about debt, and provide early examples of its abuses (like debt slavery) and the revolt against such abuses (in the form of the flight or rebellion of the victims, with profound implications for personal relations, quite observable in such works as the Bible).
That conflict between rapacious creditors and more humane policies, came together strikingly in the "Axial Age" (which he treats as roughly extending from 600 BCE to 600 CE). Conventionally thought of as an era of moral progress, because of its foundational ethical and religious developments (this was the crucial formative era for the Abrahamic and Dharmic faiths, from the Biblical prophets to Buddha, as well as the speculations of Greek and Chinese philosophers), Graeber emphasizes that this was in substantial part a reaction to another dimension of the era, its ruthless materialism, in economic matters above all, where society shifted away from a reliance on credit, toward "hard cash," commodity, typically metallic, money. This was epitomized by the vast empires that prevailed across most of the continent's more densely peopled spaces--the Roman, Mauryan and Han Empires especially--which functioned as expanding military-slavery-coinage complexes (where armies were used to make conquests and capture slaves and mines, the former to work the latter, to pay for more armies and more conquests in an ongoing cycle). Unsurprisingly this period saw creditors obtain substantial legal and political advantages relative to debtors, on whom debt burdens weighed much more heavily; and whose disadvantages were at times moderated by reformers (often, a matter of the spoils of empire relieving the poorer members of a dominant group, like Rome's citizens) but never eliminated.
Such a change awaited the end of the period, and of its empires. As these exhausted the possibilities of their expansion within the limits set by geography and their technological bases, they simply collapsed, eventually resulting in less militarized societies where slavery was of less economic importance, with the same going for metallic money--increasingly, a virtual matter in what were in general less materialistic, more idealistic societies (in the epistemological sense of the term, of course). Emblematic of the shift was the way in which much of Eurasia saw usury banned outright in what he characterized as not merely the Western, but the Eurasian, "Middle Ages."
However, if the Medieval era was not exclusively Western, the West was an outlier in important respects--in the depth of its imperial collapse (this was no Dark Age elsewhere), and the extent of its embrace of the "corporate" type of institution in the aftermath--pioneered a return to the old stress on tangible, metallic money; and on imperial military-slavery-coinage complexes designed to maximize the supply of it. The very rationale underlay the era's mercantilism and associated voyages of discovery and colonization efforts, which once more produced a worldwide system of empire. This was, of course, the Europe-centered colonial system, turbo-charged by the emergence of full-blown, labor time-commodifying, M-C-M-circit-running capitalism that defined Modernity.
This prevailed until what had become the leading Western and world power, the U.S., abandoned the gold standard in 1971, which Graeber identifies as a return to virtual money. Curiously the era has so far seen creditors retain their advantage, and indeed, become central to the system, their trading in debt and their use of debt forcing governments to accept their program at the core of the neoliberal project dominating the last half century (ironically, as the bailing out of insolvent financial institutions testifies to the extraordinary leniency toward the biggest debtors of all), with the contradictions all too apparent in the confusion, unease and dissent of the moment.
As the description just given shows, Graeber sets the nature and implications of debt and indebtedness, the advent of those most basic economic concepts and institutions, the significance of the Axial Age, and our grasp of the ancient-Medieval-modern division of history, all on their heads. Often I was reminded of Karl Polanyi's classic debunking of the "myth of the market" so beloved by free-market theorists, but Graeber's work is grounded in a far greater wealth of data, and its argument is more intricate and wider in scope (while along the way, enriched by numerous, fascinating smaller theses--like the idea that the chivalric knight-errant in seach of fortune and glory was a Medieval sublimation of the merchant's activity into that of the feudal warriors it sung).
In fairness, much of Graeber's reconstruction of the politico-economic history of Eurasia and the world struck me as counterintuitive. However, that our ingrained assumptions about such matters are historically contingent is partly Graeber's point--the reason why he spends so much of the first half of the book lingering on (to contemporary Western readers) obscure and bizarre customs and beliefs, past and present; while on continued reflection I saw nothing to show the basics of his argument were really implausible, or inconsistent with the known facts. In fact, some of his more seemingly radical statements fit quite well with what we know. (For instance, while I reserve judgment on the matter in regard to China and India, whose histories I know less well, the Roman Empire, as described by Joseph Tainter, among others, accords well with his model of a military-slavery-coinage complex.) And the longer I thought about his case, the more, not less, sense it made.
All this is a very great achievement, enough so as to amply justify the work, though as might be expected given the note on which the history ends--that strange and uncertain phase into which we have entered in the past half century--Graeber is not merely explaining the past, but explicitly interested in the implications of this reading of history, this understanding of economic and social life, for the economic and social life of the early twenty-first century. That extends as far as the harsh and punitive conventional wisdom regarding the repayment of debt as one of the most basic moral obligations, in the name of which politicians have in recent decades inflicted enormous misery on populations from Mexico to Malaysia.
Reflecting on all this Graeber makes clear that an older way of understanding and living in the world is, if you will forgive the unintended pun, bankrupt, but a new one yet to emerge. Indeed, he suggests that contrary to the much maligned and yet (in the mainstream) virtually uncontested "end of history" school, we may be looking at the end of not just a particular attitude to debt, but capitalism itself, perhaps within a generation. That a book presenting this thought, so heretical to orthodox opinion that it has not had a real mainstream hearing for generations, is getting the attention it has (even contemptuous attention from the guardians of that orthodoxy) would seem to say a great deal about how the range of ideas that can be spoken in public has widened. By and large, it has been the right that has been more conspicuous, raising the profile of overt racism within the mainstream as talking heads treat the likes of Steve Bannon with deference on their shows. Still, however resistant elites remain to the ideas of the left, it is undeniable that much of the public does not regard the word "socialism" as the anathema it seemed such a short time ago.
That said, one need not accept Graeber's position regarding our contemporary political and economic life to find interest or value in his understanding of the past. However, those willing and able to at least engage with his ideas about them may be interested to know that in discussing our present discontents in this book he introduced an idea he developed at geater length in an article in Thomas Frank's The Baffler, "Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,". Specifically he holds that neoliberalism has not been about a more efficient, fast-growing capitalism, but mere preservation of that system's social relations--an idea he has since developed even further in his essay collection The Utopia of Rules (reviewed here), and further than that in his more recent Bullshit Jobs (reviewed here).
1. Lest the simple-minded get confused--as one reviewer of this book who (clearly devoted to the old myth of the market) foamed at the mouth with hostility and intent on treating Graeber's argument as a straw man did--money, and its use as a unit of account, is one thing; and physical money handled and transferred by one to another as a matter of course in daily economic transactions still another thing; with the advent of coinage still not necessarily implied in even the latter. Equally, it is one thing to speak of barter or exchange, another to speak of private exchange in markets as a central organizing principle in economic life.
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David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years does precisely what its title promises, offer a history of its titular subject, and in a broader sense than this reader might expect--not least, because of how much more the word can mean than they might guess, which is in fact Graeber's starting point, as Graeber goes on to show. The first half of the book is a meditation on the idea of debt itself--both how deeply the idea suffuses our moral and religious ideas, our social relationships and language, all around the world; and at the same time, how varied and how (to modern people) strange the thinking about it has been. Indeed, much of it consists of lengthy discussions of comparatively exotic cultural notions about it, and in particular the idea of a "human economy" as manifested in societies ranging from the Irish to the Tiv.
Still, rather than just cataloguing this variety Graeber does advance a number of bold theses. Particularly important among them is that indebtedness, rather than the unfortunate and disreputable position we now think of it as being, may have been regarded as a normal, natural condition, and even a cement holding society together by connecting individuals together, an attitude reflected in the protections traditionally afforded debtors--like the Biblical "Year of Jubilee" which periodically canceled debts. Important, too, is his subversion of the most basic thinking about markets, money, debt. Where conventionally (in Adam Smith, for instance) a "natural" human tendency to exchange for comparative advantage is held to have made markets intuitive, and these are supposed to have led to money, and money to debts, with states generally outside the process, he contends that it was the rise of large, complex institutions--the temple complexes of ancient Mesopotamia identifiable as its state structures--that led to debt. By way of the need for units of account debt led to money, rather than the other way around, while it was states that fostered markets for the sake of mobilizing economies behind military endeavor, and the same rationale led to the transformation of by that point long familiar precious metal-based money into coinage--the standardized little pieces of those metals being handy for paying soldiers on the move.1
The second half of the book, building on many of these ideas, shifts to a systematic history of the development of debt across what might be thought of as the Eurasian "rimlands" over the past three millennia--the Mediterranean region, southern Asia, China, and eventually Western Europe. As noted earlier, Mesopotamia, and southern Asia more generally, were crucial scenes of the development of thinking about debt, and provide early examples of its abuses (like debt slavery) and the revolt against such abuses (in the form of the flight or rebellion of the victims, with profound implications for personal relations, quite observable in such works as the Bible).
That conflict between rapacious creditors and more humane policies, came together strikingly in the "Axial Age" (which he treats as roughly extending from 600 BCE to 600 CE). Conventionally thought of as an era of moral progress, because of its foundational ethical and religious developments (this was the crucial formative era for the Abrahamic and Dharmic faiths, from the Biblical prophets to Buddha, as well as the speculations of Greek and Chinese philosophers), Graeber emphasizes that this was in substantial part a reaction to another dimension of the era, its ruthless materialism, in economic matters above all, where society shifted away from a reliance on credit, toward "hard cash," commodity, typically metallic, money. This was epitomized by the vast empires that prevailed across most of the continent's more densely peopled spaces--the Roman, Mauryan and Han Empires especially--which functioned as expanding military-slavery-coinage complexes (where armies were used to make conquests and capture slaves and mines, the former to work the latter, to pay for more armies and more conquests in an ongoing cycle). Unsurprisingly this period saw creditors obtain substantial legal and political advantages relative to debtors, on whom debt burdens weighed much more heavily; and whose disadvantages were at times moderated by reformers (often, a matter of the spoils of empire relieving the poorer members of a dominant group, like Rome's citizens) but never eliminated.
Such a change awaited the end of the period, and of its empires. As these exhausted the possibilities of their expansion within the limits set by geography and their technological bases, they simply collapsed, eventually resulting in less militarized societies where slavery was of less economic importance, with the same going for metallic money--increasingly, a virtual matter in what were in general less materialistic, more idealistic societies (in the epistemological sense of the term, of course). Emblematic of the shift was the way in which much of Eurasia saw usury banned outright in what he characterized as not merely the Western, but the Eurasian, "Middle Ages."
However, if the Medieval era was not exclusively Western, the West was an outlier in important respects--in the depth of its imperial collapse (this was no Dark Age elsewhere), and the extent of its embrace of the "corporate" type of institution in the aftermath--pioneered a return to the old stress on tangible, metallic money; and on imperial military-slavery-coinage complexes designed to maximize the supply of it. The very rationale underlay the era's mercantilism and associated voyages of discovery and colonization efforts, which once more produced a worldwide system of empire. This was, of course, the Europe-centered colonial system, turbo-charged by the emergence of full-blown, labor time-commodifying, M-C-M-circit-running capitalism that defined Modernity.
This prevailed until what had become the leading Western and world power, the U.S., abandoned the gold standard in 1971, which Graeber identifies as a return to virtual money. Curiously the era has so far seen creditors retain their advantage, and indeed, become central to the system, their trading in debt and their use of debt forcing governments to accept their program at the core of the neoliberal project dominating the last half century (ironically, as the bailing out of insolvent financial institutions testifies to the extraordinary leniency toward the biggest debtors of all), with the contradictions all too apparent in the confusion, unease and dissent of the moment.
As the description just given shows, Graeber sets the nature and implications of debt and indebtedness, the advent of those most basic economic concepts and institutions, the significance of the Axial Age, and our grasp of the ancient-Medieval-modern division of history, all on their heads. Often I was reminded of Karl Polanyi's classic debunking of the "myth of the market" so beloved by free-market theorists, but Graeber's work is grounded in a far greater wealth of data, and its argument is more intricate and wider in scope (while along the way, enriched by numerous, fascinating smaller theses--like the idea that the chivalric knight-errant in seach of fortune and glory was a Medieval sublimation of the merchant's activity into that of the feudal warriors it sung).
In fairness, much of Graeber's reconstruction of the politico-economic history of Eurasia and the world struck me as counterintuitive. However, that our ingrained assumptions about such matters are historically contingent is partly Graeber's point--the reason why he spends so much of the first half of the book lingering on (to contemporary Western readers) obscure and bizarre customs and beliefs, past and present; while on continued reflection I saw nothing to show the basics of his argument were really implausible, or inconsistent with the known facts. In fact, some of his more seemingly radical statements fit quite well with what we know. (For instance, while I reserve judgment on the matter in regard to China and India, whose histories I know less well, the Roman Empire, as described by Joseph Tainter, among others, accords well with his model of a military-slavery-coinage complex.) And the longer I thought about his case, the more, not less, sense it made.
All this is a very great achievement, enough so as to amply justify the work, though as might be expected given the note on which the history ends--that strange and uncertain phase into which we have entered in the past half century--Graeber is not merely explaining the past, but explicitly interested in the implications of this reading of history, this understanding of economic and social life, for the economic and social life of the early twenty-first century. That extends as far as the harsh and punitive conventional wisdom regarding the repayment of debt as one of the most basic moral obligations, in the name of which politicians have in recent decades inflicted enormous misery on populations from Mexico to Malaysia.
Reflecting on all this Graeber makes clear that an older way of understanding and living in the world is, if you will forgive the unintended pun, bankrupt, but a new one yet to emerge. Indeed, he suggests that contrary to the much maligned and yet (in the mainstream) virtually uncontested "end of history" school, we may be looking at the end of not just a particular attitude to debt, but capitalism itself, perhaps within a generation. That a book presenting this thought, so heretical to orthodox opinion that it has not had a real mainstream hearing for generations, is getting the attention it has (even contemptuous attention from the guardians of that orthodoxy) would seem to say a great deal about how the range of ideas that can be spoken in public has widened. By and large, it has been the right that has been more conspicuous, raising the profile of overt racism within the mainstream as talking heads treat the likes of Steve Bannon with deference on their shows. Still, however resistant elites remain to the ideas of the left, it is undeniable that much of the public does not regard the word "socialism" as the anathema it seemed such a short time ago.
That said, one need not accept Graeber's position regarding our contemporary political and economic life to find interest or value in his understanding of the past. However, those willing and able to at least engage with his ideas about them may be interested to know that in discussing our present discontents in this book he introduced an idea he developed at geater length in an article in Thomas Frank's The Baffler, "Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,". Specifically he holds that neoliberalism has not been about a more efficient, fast-growing capitalism, but mere preservation of that system's social relations--an idea he has since developed even further in his essay collection The Utopia of Rules (reviewed here), and further than that in his more recent Bullshit Jobs (reviewed here).
1. Lest the simple-minded get confused--as one reviewer of this book who (clearly devoted to the old myth of the market) foamed at the mouth with hostility and intent on treating Graeber's argument as a straw man did--money, and its use as a unit of account, is one thing; and physical money handled and transferred by one to another as a matter of course in daily economic transactions still another thing; with the advent of coinage still not necessarily implied in even the latter. Equally, it is one thing to speak of barter or exchange, another to speak of private exchange in markets as a central organizing principle in economic life.
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Neoliberalism and Technological Slowdown
The possibility that the rate of technological change slowed after the mid-twentieth century has interested me for over a decade--as has the correlation of that slowdown with the neoliberal turn, about which I have had occasion to write much. Of course, the neoliberal decades have been decades of weak growth with what came before--perhaps even very weak growth.
Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy in Capital Resurgent contend that the technological slowdown led to slower productivity growth and slower growth generally, which helped prompt the neoliberal turn.1 Yet, one could argue that the relationship has been the other way around--that neoliberalism contributed to a technological slowdown. It is not at all difficult to think up reasons why this might be the case--the neoliberal preference for speculative over productive investment, a "short-termism" in management (fixated on quarterly balance sheets, the highest possible share prices and dividend payouts at a given moment, and the excuses they provide for preposterous executive compensation, and to hell with everything else) that wreaks havoc with genuinely productive work and especially R & D, an IP system run amok that has innovators getting in each others' way.1
There is, too, the disincentive of the ample, cheap labor supply opened up by convenient offshoring and the collapse of the Communist bloc for the development of labor-saving technologies, and the encouragement that the concentration of global sectors in a few, oligopolistic hands provides for sustaining rather than breakthrough technologies, and the opportunities corporate colossi have for defending themselves against disruption. (Consider how long and successfully Big Oil has warded off the challenge from renewable energy technologies.) And there is the austerity that has proceeded from all of it, leading to the trimming of research budgets (often, in unintelligent ways), while discouraging not just the speculation-mad but anyone from investing to the degree they otherwise might.
It seems to me that any serious discussion of the rate of progress, whether a case for its having slowed down, sped up or anything else, needs to take account of all that.
1. In Capital Resurgent the fuller reading of the history is that technological advance slowed in the '60s, encouraging finance's efforts to get the upper hand in economic life, the essence of the neoliberal turn; but that technological progress did resurge later in the century, despite which finance remained dominant, and neoliberalism endured. In fairness, the original edition of the book appeared about the turn of the twenty-first century (2000), when the argument for revived progress seemed more plausible. (To go by Robert Gordon's work, the 1996-2004 period did see strong advance, which petered out again.)
Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy in Capital Resurgent contend that the technological slowdown led to slower productivity growth and slower growth generally, which helped prompt the neoliberal turn.1 Yet, one could argue that the relationship has been the other way around--that neoliberalism contributed to a technological slowdown. It is not at all difficult to think up reasons why this might be the case--the neoliberal preference for speculative over productive investment, a "short-termism" in management (fixated on quarterly balance sheets, the highest possible share prices and dividend payouts at a given moment, and the excuses they provide for preposterous executive compensation, and to hell with everything else) that wreaks havoc with genuinely productive work and especially R & D, an IP system run amok that has innovators getting in each others' way.1
There is, too, the disincentive of the ample, cheap labor supply opened up by convenient offshoring and the collapse of the Communist bloc for the development of labor-saving technologies, and the encouragement that the concentration of global sectors in a few, oligopolistic hands provides for sustaining rather than breakthrough technologies, and the opportunities corporate colossi have for defending themselves against disruption. (Consider how long and successfully Big Oil has warded off the challenge from renewable energy technologies.) And there is the austerity that has proceeded from all of it, leading to the trimming of research budgets (often, in unintelligent ways), while discouraging not just the speculation-mad but anyone from investing to the degree they otherwise might.
It seems to me that any serious discussion of the rate of progress, whether a case for its having slowed down, sped up or anything else, needs to take account of all that.
1. In Capital Resurgent the fuller reading of the history is that technological advance slowed in the '60s, encouraging finance's efforts to get the upper hand in economic life, the essence of the neoliberal turn; but that technological progress did resurge later in the century, despite which finance remained dominant, and neoliberalism endured. In fairness, the original edition of the book appeared about the turn of the twenty-first century (2000), when the argument for revived progress seemed more plausible. (To go by Robert Gordon's work, the 1996-2004 period did see strong advance, which petered out again.)
Mass Technological Unemployment Has Already Happened
The renewed vibrancy of progress in the areas of artificial intelligence and robotics has revived interest in the possibility of rapid, near-term automation eliminating vast numbers of jobs in the coming years. I will not here concern myself with the plausibility of the prediction. Rather what interests me here is the fact that this has already happened.
The claim is less shocking or original than it might appear. In fact, I first came across such a claim just as I was beginning to take a serious interest in matters of economics, Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work (1994). The "end" of work he predicted did not prove so imminent as he thought, but his argument regarding mass technological unemployment as already having happened stuck with me.
Basically, the Industrial Revolution in fairly short order exploded productivity, and displaced labor at a very rapid rate. However, all this has been concealed by three factors.
1. The first, most direct, but least noticed is that people are working less. The school-leaving age is later, higher education is bigger than ever, and people expect to retire. In between people work shorter weeks than they used to (the 12, even 10 hour day a thing of the past). There has also been an increasingly minimal definition of what it means to be employed, whether one thinks in terms of the expansion of part-time, temporary and other irregular employment, or the propensity of governments to fudge the figures in an attempt to show that things are better than they really are. (In Britain, one hour worked in the last week counts as employment.) This conceals a great deal of unemployment, and even more underemployment.
2. A massive amount of labor has been soaked up in marginal or even wasteful uses. Bluntly characterized as "bullshit jobs" by David Graeber, this includes such activities as advertising and marketing, the hypertrophy of the finance-insurance-real estate complex (to twenty percent of U.S. GDP), and the blooming of a health care bureaucracy (explicitly defended on the grounds that while it is wasteful, it is a major employer). There is even make-work of this kind in manufacturing, thanks to built-in obsolescence and product differentiation. And many genuinely productive jobs contain an increasing bullshit component, so that more people end up working them than might otherwise be the case. All this has multiplier effects--as an "unnecessary" financial firm will still need office space necessitating construction, utilities and janitorial services.
(Of course, that one can discuss work in this way is enough to make a market fundamentalist seethe. In their view if someone is willing to pay for something, that is sufficient proof of its value according to neoclassical thinkers' use of marginal utility. But these same people also say unemployment doesn't really exist and you can't run out of resources, so we know what their theories are worth, don't we?)
3. Massive state action, which takes two forms. One is the dramatic expansion of the state, paid for with high and progressive taxation, deficit spending or both, with the money going to such things as enlarged military-industrial complexes, and welfare programs. All of these generate further employment quite directly, while by way of transfer payments, welfare systems put purchasing power in the hands of people who would not otherwise have it, yet again contributing to consumption and employment. The other, related form is the expansion of credit in an age of fiat money, especially explosive after the end of the gold standard. Governments, businesses, households borrow money and spend it, again keeping the economy going.
David Graeber, in his recent take on the issue, suggests that if just some of this were taken into account we might find the real unemployment rate is a mind-boggling fifty, even sixty percent.
We might respond in unconstructive ways--with more statistical manipulation, with more bullshit jobs, with dubious credit expansions. (Alas, I think we're already pushing the limit there.) We might respond in constructive ways--for example, with shorter work days and weeks and years, with works schemes addressing real problems (we sure could do with a rebuild of our infrastructures, in the U.S., anyway), a strengthened system for supporting human beings (for instance, a Universal Basic Income scheme). But whatever we do, the fact remains that mass technological unemployment is something with which we already live today.
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The claim is less shocking or original than it might appear. In fact, I first came across such a claim just as I was beginning to take a serious interest in matters of economics, Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work (1994). The "end" of work he predicted did not prove so imminent as he thought, but his argument regarding mass technological unemployment as already having happened stuck with me.
Basically, the Industrial Revolution in fairly short order exploded productivity, and displaced labor at a very rapid rate. However, all this has been concealed by three factors.
1. The first, most direct, but least noticed is that people are working less. The school-leaving age is later, higher education is bigger than ever, and people expect to retire. In between people work shorter weeks than they used to (the 12, even 10 hour day a thing of the past). There has also been an increasingly minimal definition of what it means to be employed, whether one thinks in terms of the expansion of part-time, temporary and other irregular employment, or the propensity of governments to fudge the figures in an attempt to show that things are better than they really are. (In Britain, one hour worked in the last week counts as employment.) This conceals a great deal of unemployment, and even more underemployment.
2. A massive amount of labor has been soaked up in marginal or even wasteful uses. Bluntly characterized as "bullshit jobs" by David Graeber, this includes such activities as advertising and marketing, the hypertrophy of the finance-insurance-real estate complex (to twenty percent of U.S. GDP), and the blooming of a health care bureaucracy (explicitly defended on the grounds that while it is wasteful, it is a major employer). There is even make-work of this kind in manufacturing, thanks to built-in obsolescence and product differentiation. And many genuinely productive jobs contain an increasing bullshit component, so that more people end up working them than might otherwise be the case. All this has multiplier effects--as an "unnecessary" financial firm will still need office space necessitating construction, utilities and janitorial services.
(Of course, that one can discuss work in this way is enough to make a market fundamentalist seethe. In their view if someone is willing to pay for something, that is sufficient proof of its value according to neoclassical thinkers' use of marginal utility. But these same people also say unemployment doesn't really exist and you can't run out of resources, so we know what their theories are worth, don't we?)
3. Massive state action, which takes two forms. One is the dramatic expansion of the state, paid for with high and progressive taxation, deficit spending or both, with the money going to such things as enlarged military-industrial complexes, and welfare programs. All of these generate further employment quite directly, while by way of transfer payments, welfare systems put purchasing power in the hands of people who would not otherwise have it, yet again contributing to consumption and employment. The other, related form is the expansion of credit in an age of fiat money, especially explosive after the end of the gold standard. Governments, businesses, households borrow money and spend it, again keeping the economy going.
David Graeber, in his recent take on the issue, suggests that if just some of this were taken into account we might find the real unemployment rate is a mind-boggling fifty, even sixty percent.
We might respond in unconstructive ways--with more statistical manipulation, with more bullshit jobs, with dubious credit expansions. (Alas, I think we're already pushing the limit there.) We might respond in constructive ways--for example, with shorter work days and weeks and years, with works schemes addressing real problems (we sure could do with a rebuild of our infrastructures, in the U.S., anyway), a strengthened system for supporting human beings (for instance, a Universal Basic Income scheme). But whatever we do, the fact remains that mass technological unemployment is something with which we already live today.
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